The Culham Laboratory hypervelocity test facility

Abslracl-This paper presents the results from an experimental investigation of plasma armature behaviour in the Culham Laboratory HTF rail launcher. The object of this work was to gain further insight into the conditions which lead OBJECTIVESThe main objectives of this work were: --to the formation of secondary plasma arcs in the rail launcher. The railgun was operated with a 1 cm square bore formed . from glass reinforced epoxy insulators and either stainless steel or copper rails. A 1 MJ, 8 kV capacitor bank was used as the power supply; this was arranged in five 200 kJ modules. The modules were sequentially fired, to produce a current waveform approximating to a linear ramp in the railgun. B-dot probes were used to measure the behaviour of the plasma armatures in the launcher. A number of calibration checks were performed to assess the quality of the B-dot probe measurements, with regard to both spatial resolution and rail current measurement. Experimental results were obtained with projectile muzzle velocities ranging from 1.5 km/s to 3.0 kmls; two free arc shots also occurred during the test series. The results show that the launcher performed much better with copper rails than with stainless steel rails. The results also show that the glass epoxy insulators performed much better than the acetyl copolymer material previously used in HTF.

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Explosive foil injection (EFI) pre-accelerator for electromagnetic launchers

Burden

Gray

Oxley

1989

IEEE Trans. Magn.

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The Culham Laboratory hypervelocity test facility

Cited by 3 publications

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Power system modelling for a tactical railgun demonstrator

Power system modelling for a tactical railgun demonstrator

Further investigations of plasma armature performance in the Culham Laboratory HTF rail launcher

Explosive foil injection (EFI) pre-accelerator for electromagnetic launchers

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